I’m also concerned about drawing general conclusions about strain host specificity as the coefficient of variation of mean lesion area across the plant species. First, this is based on single measurements and doesn’t take into account other aspects of the infection cycle which may be more relevant to the coevolutionary dynamics. Second, averaging can be misleading given that specialization by definition means decreased virulence on alternative hosts. Thus the statement “strains with increased host specificity had on average lower virulence across all Eudicots” is neither surprising nor contradictory to theoretical expectations as stated. This is exactly what one would expect for  typical specialist strains.